La Salle English Professor Kevin Grauke to “Disappear and Write’ at Artist Colony

On April 1, 2008, the late poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and La Salle University English professor/writer Kevin Grauke will make a literary connection. And it's not an April fool's joke.

On that day, Grauke begins a one-month residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, where he can write without worrying about ordinary day-to-day distractions to work on his novel-in-stories called Goodnighting, which he hopes to finish this summer.

“It gives me an opportunity to disappear and write for a period of time,’ says Grauke, who has been teaching fiction writing and literature courses at La Salle for four years. His wife Catherine and children, Eleanor, four and a half, and Peter, 3, will not accompany him to New York. Families not allowed. “My wife is very supportive,’ said Grauke. “Though she'll have her hands full with our two kids, she's very excited for me.’

The Millay colony for the Arts offers one-month residencies from April to August to writers, visual artists, and composers. Each artist receives a room, a studio and meals. Peer juries - who are not revealed until the following year - judge entries anonymously. The Millay Colony was started in 1973 by the poet's sister Norma, to “promote the vitality of the arts and the development of writers, visual artists, and composers by providing a retreat for creative work.’

Grauke's short fiction has been published in the Southern Review, Story Quarterly, Quarterly West, and Hayden's Ferry Review and other journals. His work was performed as part of the Writing Aloud series at the Interact Theater in Philadelphia. He has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, a prestigious literary prize by that honors the best “poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot’ published in the small presses over the previous year. Among the writers who received recognition in Pushcart Prize Anthologies are Raymond Carver, Tim O'Brien, and Paul Muldoon.

A recent Millay Colony jury includes Carole Maso, professor of literary arts at Brown University and author of nine books, and Justin Tussing, professor at the University of Southern Maine, whose short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker.

Millay (1892-1950) was a poet and playwright, and in 1923 became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1943, she was awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. She was the sixth recipient of that honor, and the second woman.